The present invention relates to note taking systems and, in particular, to systems and methods for retrieving information for subsequent or simultaneous manipulation.
Non-electronic methods for taking notes from books, documents, and other printed materials are generally slow or unreliable. Students, lawyers, and other people dependent upon prior authority have limited resources by which they may select desired portions of a document and reproduce them quickly and accurately. Generally, this requires marking selected passages from printed documents with tabs or highlighters and reproducing them manually at a later time.
Recent developments in the area of optical character recognition (OCR) scanning make it possible to acquire discrete text strings and organize those strings in a preselected format for later use. Such devices, however, depend upon the scanner""s ability to recognize a character based on known OCR techniques, such as geometric OCR, which detects the printed character""s shape. Variations in fonts have made it difficult to achieve total accuracy with geometric OCR.
Hypertext links provide quick access to information and documents located on the World Wide Web. Such links are embedded into a Web document and a user clicks on the hypertext link with a mouse button to initiate a request by a browser for a new Web page or new location within the same document.
In a first embodiment, a system for retrieving information relevant to selected text includes a multiple page text having spatial symbology corresponding to the text and an optical scanning device for detecting the spatial symbology. The spatial symbology may be embedded in graphic symbols within the text or the spatial symbology may be outside the graphic symbols. The system further includes a processor in communication with the optical scanning device. The processor may be internal to the optical scanning device or external to it. Preferably, the processor has a memory and is in communication with a data source. The data source may contain information relevant to the multiple page text for retrieval by the processor. In further embodiments, the system includes a computer monitor in communication with the processor whereby a user may view the information retrieved by the processor. The system may also include a printer in communication with the processor, as well as a microphone for oral annotation of the retrieved information.
In another embodiment of the invention, the data source is located at a network address. In still another embodiment, the data source contains the text corresponding to the spatial symbology in digital form.
In accordance with another aspect of the present invention, a method for retrieving information relevant to selected text includes providing a multiple page text with spatial symbology. The spatial symbology corresponding to selected text is scanned with an optical scanning device and transmitted to a processor with memory that is in communication with the optical scanning device. The spatial symbology is identified in the processor and information relevant to the text is located in a data source in communication with the processor. The information from the data source is then read by the processor.
In another embodiment of the invention, the information is written to a document in a word processor in communication with the processor. A file of the information may also be created by the processor, and the information may be viewed on a computer monitor in communication with the processor. In yet other embodiments, the information is printed by a printer in communication with the processor or orally annotated via a microphone that is in communication with the processor.